MAGNIFICATION

This would be the last Yes studio album for a decade or so. The band had spent the 1990s putting out a range of material, some warmly received but more for nostalgia value than for anything original it was doing (does anyone really prefer the original songs on the Keys To Ascension album over the live takes on classic Yes tunes?), some reviled (Rick Wakeman has that joke where he says Union should have been called Onion, because it makes him cry to think about, and let's not even talk about, er, Talk).

Before then, of course, you had 90125 and Big Generator - the former a pop hit which aggravated prog purists as much as it delighted a broader audience, the latter an attempt to rehash that formula which didn't quite hit the same heights. And before that, you had Drama - an album I personally love but which some Yes fans can't get behind - and before that you had Tormato, an album which also has its detractors but seems to have less passionate defenders than Drama...

So, yes, by 2001 Yes were still casting about looking for a musical direction which could sustain them for more than an album or two - and to some, Magnification is that album. For my part, I think it's a worthwhile experiment, but not something to put on a par with their better works. The basic conceit here is that we've got Yes without a keyboardist this time around - Anderson, Howe, Squire, and White are all present and correct, Rick Wakeman wasn't about for the studio sessions or subsequent tour. In place of a keyboardist, they slot in an orchestra, with Larry Groupé conducting and contributing to the orchestrations.

At least in concept, this is an interesting shift in the band's sound which feels novel whilst still feeling Yes-like - the orchestra fits the niche taken by keyboards and synths in more classic Yes material rather nicely. The difficulty is in the execution - the song concepts here too often feel a little thin on ideas, and there's too many moments when you realise that the orchestra is just playing pretty passages over a fairly uninspiring song being played by the rest of the band.

Perhaps the band were leaving these passages so that Groupé and the orchestra could step in and wow us with something, like they'd otherwise leave passages for a keyboardist to do the same, but pretty much by definition an orchestra is not a soloist - and trying to write for an orchestra like you'd write for a keyboardist (or a lead guitarist, or any other soloist in a rock group) ultimately is not going to lead to you making the best use of it.

Jon Anderson's voice is in fine form and is perhaps the part of this which holds up the bet - otherwise there's just a few too many points where the band seem to step aside for a complex and intricate solo which fails to manifest. There's also some MIDI guitars here and there courtesy of Anderson which, like many MIDI instruments of the era, have aged like milk. (It's a bit of a rule of thumb that if you you're noticing it's MIDI, then it's not especially well-executed MIDI, and it feels like that applies here.)

With the band also seemingly torn between their prog and pop instincts (there's a multi-part composition to pander to the former, and little songs like Don't Go for the latter), Magnification finds Yes yet again struggling with the same basic problem which had been haunting them for well over a decade by this point, and has kept cropping its head up ever since - namely, an unwillingness to wholly commit to one musical direction or another for the long haul. The orchestra experiment at least adds enough novelty to make this an interesting one to listen to once, and it scrapes its way to a third star on that basis but I simply can't imagine this ever getting the level of rotation I give even to Tormato or 90125.